Dutch rules will soon prevent schoolchildren from having a phone in classroom
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
There's been interesting debates in parlement preceding this measure, with several interesting position papers on the topic from researchers, and even student associations [2]. The researchers emphasize that adolescents are much more susceptible to the bad effects of smartphones, due to inexperience with dopamine and its effects on dopamine production, being easier to condition, FOMO. The main adverse effect they name is what they call a 'crumbling brain', with a short attention span unable to focus on one thing for a longer time. An often-repeated soundbyte is that students using smartphones often score in average 1-1.5 points less on tests, on a scale of 1 to 10.
I dunno what to think about it. As noted by the student association, it seems like children won't get the chance to learn how to handle the traps smartphones pose. Then again, I was free to use mine in high school and I'm still addicted to the thing :/
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2481424-kabinet-geeft-dringend-advies...
[2] https://www.tweedekamer.nl/debat_en_vergadering/commissiever...
I personally think phones definitely shouldn't be used in a classroom. I don't even see what benefit you would get from it, but it definitely shouldn't be legislated over. If a teacher or school wants to ban it then they should be able to.
why do you presuppose a political motive for the researchers? What's political about this?
Note the "dislike and fear", which is fully subjective and fundamentally not based on evidence. This is regardless of whether there actually is data to support this position; the fear exists nonetheless, and data can only back it up or contradict their intuition.
Most politicians have children, and most of the voting body has children.
This is very much a politically charged issue.
Researchers often do research based on their world view. Did these people also try to research what happens if they integrate the technology into education and teach children about the possible dangers of it, or did they focus on just whatever could confirm their world view?
We do not have school board meetings the way you do. We do have parents' councils, and parents' councils have delegates that represent all parents at school councils, and school councils additionally have delegates representing the local government, the school employees, and the students. The school council then negotiates with the school leadership (which is not elected, but appointed by national organisations). This is a lot more reflective of the "indirect democracy" principles that are common here in Europe.
What this means, practically, is that unless you've got broad support for your initiatives you can go pound sand if you disagree with how your kid's school is run.
I don't understand the reasoning in performing this type of deep analysis. If the purpose of the device is to enhance education, it can be in the classroom. If it it's not, it's essentially a toy, and it has no place in the classroom. Why even bring dopamine in to it?
of course it might make sense to then have a very different class that deals with the whole problem of supercharged dependence forming devices and activities.
That way, every student has access to the device, and every student will have the same device, and there is no risk that the device is used for e.g. watching tiktok.
Mobile phones are cheap enough for this to be a reality.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but this is entirely in the hands of the parents and far from new. You build their mental toughness by taking them under your wing and introducing them to the offline world beyond the walls of home and school.
How realistic is my intention, parents with schoolgoing kids?
No one learns. The bitter fact no one even wants to think about: Almost everyone in the modern society is an addict of digital screens as much as their real life obligations allow them to be.
Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
I was playing Oregon Trail.
School IT admins are assholes for no reason.
I cannot imagine I would have bothered to pay attention at all if I could just be scrolling twitter or reddit all day. There's a reason why I block these apps on my own phone during work hours.
Not while sitting in the back row of math class, though.
> Nowadays people can spend 14hrs a day on their phone and still not be bored, it's crazy.
How this can be crazy? You have unlimited library of people, photos, information, videos, absolutely anything in your hand. It would be crazy not use it. I use my smartphone even now to write this comment.
> Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
And also it will succesfully separate you from social information, trends. Which is good but also could become issue.
Being bored was okay. It was part of life, and good for you. It not only got you to put in effort into not being bored (_eventually_), but just not being entertained is good for your mental well being. None of us realised this at the time of course.
I remember times "before internet", when there no internet, no mobile phones, only books, TV with 3 channels, gossips, newspapers and radio. And so? I remember when cranky old men shouts "enough books,enough TV,enough radio, enough music". I'm now cranky old man, so what?
I still do not realize it.
There’s enough time for smartphone use outside school hours. It’s a waste of time/energy for the tutor if no one is paying attention. Of course I’d try to make the lecture as interesting and ‘fun’ as possible, but winning their attention over Insta/TikTok/etc is challenging.
Arguably, yes. You learn to deal with discomfort, which is good for your mental health. Changing circumstances to avoid discomfort puts the power in externalities, whereas learning to deal with situations you don't like puts the power internally (you). The modern world trains us to run away from anything we don't like, and here we are.
Also, most people don't sit in a room voluntarily because they're looking to be bored (unless it's for meditation, but that's not the same thing). It's usually because of someone else.
now you can do it anywhere, such as in the middle of a work call, or in class.
The difference is that now almost everyone can.
How it can be crazy is that they are ignoring the existence of 4K, 30 inch monitors, peering into a tiny screen that you have to dab at like an imbecile.
For you, perhaps.
I sometimes forget mine exists; then I remember the thing and find it discharged.
I can waste hours on a real computer, though, with a large screen, and a real mouse and keyboard.
If students can’t use them, neither should adults.
I submit that any effective jamming or interference of wireless devices could be disabled in an emergency.
Of course, if there is a rule, it should be enforceable by teachers. Teacher says no phone? Put the fucking phone away, child.
That being said, discipline in schools is a huge can of worms in the US. Bu, in principle, the specific phone problem has solutions.
But at the same time I want them to go to school without any smartphone, I want them to feel that freedom from social media at least during the school day. Not just that school locks them up, but that they eventually learn to not even bring it.
That’s the usual policy here in France. Smartphones are not allowed at all. Dumb phones are but they can’t be taken out of the bags in the classroom, which makes sense. I am much more comfortable giving my kid a dumb feature phone as well. It’s enough to send text messages and call in an emergency, but it makes him less of a target for mugging.
Do they search the kid's bags?
I went to school 2007-2012 so the laws might have changed since then, or this might have been illegal. In PE class one day, we all got changed and left our clothes and bags in the changing room, then while we were on the field doing sport the deputy headteacher went to the changing room and went through everyone's bags and blazers to find phones and valuables. He took them all and made everyone think they had been stolen.
He revealed it after five minutes of the class noticing things were missing, and said it was supposed to be a lesson about safety. How theft happens and we shouldn't have valuable items on us at school, and if we do then they should be locked away somewhere secure when we leave our bags somewhere.
I doubt that was actually the case, I think he was just trying to get an idea of how many people have smartphones, and who those people were. This was right when they were invented so it was very rare for a kid to have one when I was a first year, but every year more and more kids got them handed down from their parents.
As to the deputy head's given reason (a lesson about safety and guarding against theft), I'd tend to think that was his genuine reason. Theft of valuable personal items in a school is a major headache for the school. The police may get involved. The school doesn't want weaker-minded students being constantly exposed to the temptation, some succumbing to that temptation, and some getting caught and having to be expelled, etc. Better to make students aware of the risk and to have rules against students bringing valuable items to school.
(agree with everything else, just wanted to add a precision. Also, the school has the parent numbers).
Now I see every child being DRIVEN to school in a separate vehicle by a parent, blockading entire neighborhoods around the school. It's pathetic and irritating as hell.
And we're talking about L.A., where you can't blame the weather. These kids are going to be helpless dweebs.
Really? Why? I drove my kid to school up until the point that he got his driver's license this year and could drive himself. He's not a helpless dweeb. In fact, he just caught a plane to DC to attend a high school summer program at Georgetown University. He didn't have any trouble navigating himself there. I didn't hear a word from the time he left the house until he called me to let me know he'd checked into the dorm five states away.
Yes many get driven by their parents. I used to drive mine before they were old enough to do it themselves because it was only a short detour off my way to work anyway, and if they had to take the bus they'd have to wake up nearly an hour earlier, and I thought the extra sleep for them was worth it.
I, my parents, my cousins and my nephew and nieces all went/are going to school by ourselves by age 6-7. I do not think this change anything?
They may well be a part of your everyday life, and likely of the everyday lives of everyone you know, but what makes you think that smartphones are a part of the everyday lives of French schoolchildren?
And even if they were, how is it in any way harmful for smartphones to not be a part of the time they spend in school?
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. If it is useful, they will pick it up. I mean, most people alive did not have a smartphone before growing up, and yet most of us are using one without issue right now. You’re setting a child up for failure if he does not learn things like how to handle frustration or behave with other people when he grows up. Not how to operate a trivial device.
> Then your kids risk falling behind and becoming as adept with technology as "old people" today.
By the time they’re old, they will be as useless with the new technologies of the time as elderly are with computers now. Not because they did not learn it at school, just because you lose mental agility and adaptability as you age. Smartphones most likely will be a prehistoric anachronism by the time they get old.
> but let's not act like this isn't a potential downside when they are a part of everyday life for French adults.
Most French adults right now did not have a smartphone before they turned 20. They are managing just fine.
I know plenty of people that do not. They have a smartphone and they use some of the features like taking pictures, text messaging apps and calling, but doing other things is unlikely. When my mom gets a new phone she has someone else set it up for her, because she can't. My grandparents have probably never used a computer either.
Most people never understand technology, but most young people do understand the zeitgeist of their age because they have a lot of free time and a strong desire to fit in. It's just their social world and pop culture are on a phone now.
If anything, they have very low tech skills. They are consumers of apps highly optimized for convenience. They're never challenged, need to fix anything, solve a problem.
Getting over the fear of using these kinds of devices. Look at old people. At least around here there are plenty of them that are incapable of using basically anything more complicated than a TV. Some might be able to use computers, but can't really operate smartphones etc. And it's largely because they don't have experience and constantly avoid it.
When you momentarily pause your Tiktok addiction for a few hours during school hours and then happily continue afterwards, no potential new learning was missed.
At my primary school, we were encouraged to bring computers to the classroom. The school also had many classes full of computers, and laptops too - all older second-hand models, but that didn't matter. We used them during most "normal" classes - not just the IT class. My last year of school we also utilized smartphones since that became the next big thing around 2010. Today they hand out tablets instead of laptops.
Almost every one of my classmates works in tech now, or at least makes heavy use of computers/programming in their out-of-tech careers. Practically all of them make many times more than the national average wage.
No, this wasn't a school for gifted students - in my country we go to the school we're assigned based on our residence. Incredible luck I got where I was. I'm sure half of the kids would live a very shitty life had they lived few streets away, but luckily thanks to the computerized education they got, they were able to overcome their bad upbringing (alcoholic parents, etc).
It's very sad that someone thinks a global ban is in any way good. Sure, if they can't handle it - let the schools ban it. But a global ban that would prevent innovative schools and teachers from teaching about/with it? That sucks big time.
And I just don't get why the governments aren't rather thinking about how to integrate the tech into the class on national scale. This whole thing seems political to me - there are many conservatives that just hate modern tech pushing for this. The porn argument is stupid - porn is part of modern life, teach children about the dangers of it, or they will overdose on it once the leash is gone; and it's not like the kids don't have a phone after school, who the hell would masturbate in school anyways. Same with social media.
And I do think that children should be taught to use online resources wisely, almost certainly as part of a course on critical thinking.
To answer your question, NONE of my classmates did. It would be weird to lug your Apple II or Atari 800 to class with a monitor and extension cord! And our schools (USA) work the same way: Their quality is highly dependent on the neighborhood they're in.
Smartphones are very useful, but the effect that the constant flow of information stemming from smartphones has on children, and the distraction they cause in an educational setting, are absolutely not a natural part of humanity, and should be scrutinized more than it is.
One can argue about this until the cows come home, for example I didn't even finish school and some of the smartest people I know learned very little in school aside from social skills.
But schools have the difficult job of catering to at least a majority of children.
Part of why NYC lifted their ban was because neither (1) nor (2) was practical: schools ended up adopting an "out of sight, out of mind" policy around phones, and actual confiscations led to larger concerns (e.g., students who were unable to contact their caretakers after school). It will be interesting to see if the Dutch can overcome either (or both) of these problems.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/013-15/mayor-de...
Banning cellphones in schools is very practical. You put them into the pouches they use at concerts. Pouches are opened at the end of the day.
If parents need to reach their kids they can do so easily. Call the school and ask for the kid.
The problem with contact is when the student leaves the school: the phone was typically confiscated for multiple days, meaning that students would be left without their phones when they left the grounds. Many parents give their children phones so they can reach them if they’re lost or similar.
Notably, the city tore up all of the payphones around the same time.
Edit: as a piece of trivia: prior to the end of the ban, there was an entire thriving industry of phone escrow vans parked outside of schools[1].
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/10/04/phone-valet/1...
American schools are prison like enough as it is.
Growing up you were simply not allowed to actively use your phone during class, outrightly banning phones from school makes no sense. We'd also use them for some class activity at least once a week.
Having recently toured about 20 secondary schools in the Netherlands I can say that most of them had a system for this. In each classroom, near the door, was a kind of cloth rack with 30 pouches where the kids would leave their phones as they entered.
Would it have been possible to grant access to a regular old school phone near the principal office or secretary office for outside calls ?
After all, if the roof fell on the kid and the smartphone is locked how can the teachers or anyone call his parents to inform they are being taken to the hospital ?
This was how it worked in my schools two decades ago. As long as you didn't use your phone there was no problem, but otherwise it was the teacher's discretion on how to handle it (within limits). Usually that meant confiscation until the end of that class, on rare occasion they'd allow calls/texts as long as it was shared with the class (to embarrass them into not doing it again).
Why is the school treating these children like clients? They aren't. If they can conform to the rules, they can come, if they can't, they don't. You don't have a natural right to be in the classroom.
(More broadly: I don't think it's remotely practical to remove students from classrooms like this. To a first approximation, every single student in school has a smartphone.)
In hindsight one of the best decisions of my life, sadly becoming more and more difficult to maintain as banking, public transportation, restaurants, and all other parts of life increasingly assume you carry a smartphone.
As you should no matter if you have a smart phone or not.
This question is fascinating to me! What form of work requires using a smart phone?
Could in theory be done with a camera + computer, but probably easier with smartphone.
The most common offender is MFA related software.
I run GrapheneOS on my phone and don't have the Google Play stuff installed. And kind of the entire point of this is that I don't want to run proprietary, closed-source stuff on my phone at all. I also like not having a ton of bloatware/spyware installed by the manufacturer that I can't remove. So anyway, I usually protest and say that I can't, and that if I'm required to use a mobile device for work purposes then I need the company to provide me with one.
Often arrangements can be made by requesting a device that can double for other work related functions. For example, I currently have a work-issued iPad with Okta Verify installed on it that also let's me reach for Safari and do iOS specific dev & testing when needed.
But it does show the creep. Companies just assume that they can request that you use your mobile device for things that you otherwise wouldn't, and that you will have no problem complying. IMO saying either "I don't own a smartphone" or "I refuse to use my personal devices for work related purposes" should be a no-questions-asked accepted position. And while I've yet to be met with hostility by saying that, it is unfortunately such a minority position that it is almost always the first time they've heard an objection.
Being at a more security-conscious (or paranoid) company can help in that case: they also don't want you to have work related things (other than MFA related software) on your personal devices, so the incentives align.
This, of course, is not the fault/problem of the people who refuse to install mfa on their personal device. Good for them.
For devs and support this means a laptop, and for ops and management a smartphone is usually needed too.
The only reason I have a phone on me when I'm at the office is for school to reach me in case my kid is taken ill or something like that.
If [company] needs me to do work on a phone, they need to provide the phone. Then they are welcome to remote-wipe it, install whatever Spyware and LockdownWare they need to, and have it back whenever they want it. I don't care.
Objecting to being asked to keep MFA tokens on your phone is like saying 'where am I supposed to keep this keycard to get into the building? In my own personal WALLET?'
2. You don't need to own a wallet to use a keycard.
In general I find segmenting things across devices a great way of mitigating overstimulation hell. Like most people I've got some trash toilet game I've become habituated to, but I only do so on a particular device that otherwise stays home. If I'm out and about and have to wait for a few minutes, there's zero temptation to pull it out and check in. Also it's simply unable to surveil my movements, as opposed to say trusting the OS permission system plus having to work around its shortcomings with something like an always-on VPN.
A common one I've seen around is food delivery workers.
Another common one, at least around here, is taxis (we used to call them "radio-taxi" since you called a taxi by dialing to a central and talking with a dispatcher, who talked to the drivers through radio; it's been a while since the bulky radios with long external whip antennas have been replaced with a smartphone app).
Another one I've occasionally seen is power company repair workers, who seemed to use their smartphones both to communicate with their central and to fill service order forms. The same for communication network repair workers (though now I'm thinking, how do the cell phone network repair workers do it? I'm guessing they must have a traditional handheld radio as a fallback).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/01/right-to-...
May of course be the case that some companies skirt the rules because they are relatively new and awareness might not be there.
For me, as an agency founder, most of my work is communicating with my team and clients. With clients: sharing progress updates, discussing possible new directions or new features, and replying to any questions they have. With team: exploring the solution space for new features, asking for updates, and managing and overseeing work done by developers on a day to day or week to week basis.
My team works remotely on hours of their choosing and their working times span ~14h of a day. Much of the work for me is intermittent and is discontinuous.
I do around ~50-60% of such work using my phone. I find it more convenient and faster than having to go to my workstation.
Is this odd?
It's odd to me that you want to do all that on a screen and keyboard smaller than a laptop screen and keyboard!
I’ve seen recently a fair amount of car enthusiasts start buying into the walkable cities/public transit mantra, because a car enthusiast does not find city/suburban stop and go traffic to be the thing they’re enthusiastic about.
Unless it's a nokia 3310 and you're like really strong.
Kids pick up on this hypocrisy and it can backfire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
Autonomy is really important - being empowered to actually make the good decision.
It's a matter of respect imo, adults often have too little of it. The best teachers I had, had a lot of it.
Kids observe, if you tell a kid to be generous but you behave selfishly the kid will assume you're full of shit and ignore what you're saying. The opposite is also true. Talk is cheap, what you actually do is what matters.
Q: Have you never been to a restaurant which has done away with physical menus ("because Covid") and has a QR code which you're supposed to scan with your device?
Well, we have been to one (in Switzerland, as it happens) despite having been seated we got up and walked out once it was clear they expected us to get on the Internet to look at their menu. Their loss.
They aren't alone either, e.g. https://www.wcpo.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/se...
People have not worked through the wide ranging implications of this "assumption", given who builds and controls everything about those devices.
But I grew up in central California and surroundings in the 90's and rode my bike everywhere. And it was horrible. I nearly died multiple times, and drivers were sometimes furious at someone biking on the road. I rode from Sac to Folsom once over a narrow bridge with no shoulder and can't believe I lived.
I thought it might be better in cities, but Berkeley, while better, was still mediocre, and Santa Monica was bad. Really, everywhere in the US is somewhere on the spectrum from "merely horrible" to "dire hellscape".
Ten years ago my wife and I moved to Ireland. Ireland is also bad, but still massively better than anywhere I've lived in the US. But now we have young kids, and we don't want "better than the US", we want "good enough your child can bike to school, and when people kill children with their cars the people are angry with the driver, not sympathetic towards them". Which means the Netherlands, or perhaps Denmark. So that's where we're going. Ireland being wildly incompetent bureaucratically it took 4 years just to process mine and my wife's naturalisation applications.
Teach your kids how to survive.
The problem isn’t people walking or cycling- it’s people driving and car manufacturers who make cars so big you can’t adequately see the space around them.
Until this is made a DUI-level offense with the same penalties, people will keep getting killed.
So, so many people touch their phones while they’re driving. Many hold it in their hands the entire time they drive. I live in a hands-free state!
It’s absolute madness at this point.
It's a disgrace. I really wonder why we must tolerate this, and who or what is behind the refusal to address it.
I live in a relatively (for the US) bike-friendly city (Tucson AZ). There's a lot of cycling infrastructure, but sometimes you have to ride on a 7-lane stroad with distracted/aggressive/inebriated drivers, many of them in vehicle types that are especially dangerous to get hit by. I'm envious of places that don't have the USA's car culture.
I'm curious how you'll find living in Netherlands as an American.
It looks like stick-built / Type V / combustible construction, and they're giving everyone an e-bike, which is mildly scary given the trouble NYC is having with structure fires started by bike and scooter batteries.
Maybe I'm being too harsh, and new housing without included parking is major progress in Arizona. Thanks for sharing in any case!
What area are you moving to?
I'm bothered mostly, because school rules are school rules. Need to adapt? Need some "modification" of the rules? A teacher can do it. If it's government rules, there are pretty sure to be some edge cases, where someone will have to break those rules to achieve something positive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cclEuSxFd_M
Note: The autogenerated (english) subtitles are a pretty decent.
You clearly have not met today's parents. Enough of them revolt at the idea of a teacher taking - even temporarily - the $1000 device they bought for their child and which they need to monitor/contact/supervise their child 24/7.
A rule like that might help teachers and schools to get overbearing parents off their backs.
My parents would intentionally delay picking up the phone as a punishment, but back then, it was a monochrome display three line phone, and I was in highschool when I first got it :) But it had both clock and alarm, which some of my classmates didn't have on their older-model phones :) (ericsson a1018 vs ga628)
I'm from NL but haven't been in school for some time so maybe this has changed. So far I thought helicopter parenting was mainly a USA phenomenon. Not that it doesn't exist here at all, just not the norm, at least ten years ago
A friend was a cop, and same thing... kid would get drunk, vomit in the middle of the city, the cops would pick him up and take him home, and the parents (instead of thanking the cop and punishing the kid) would blame others, say that someone planted alcohol in secret (since the kid is covered in red wine vomit, that would mean planting a liter of red wine in a glass of soda), etc.
But i still think that such rules (cell phones) should be in-school rules, without the need of the governments to interfere.
As for this specific issue, difficult parents has been mentioned a few times, e.g. in [1]: "But a smartphone ban leads to resistance from some parents who always want to be able to contact their children, including creative forms of sabotage and frustrating conflicts in the classroom".
With hundreds or even thousands of kids and parents, you only need a few to be unreasonable to cause a world of frustration and hurt.
[1]: https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/de-smartphone-moet-...
Such an easily defeated argument, as you point out.
How is that "overbearing" when horror stories like these are common? https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/yfskz3/aita_... https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/uc2gwy/wibta...
In fact, Apple forces you to do this if your original Apple ID is not an E-mail address. After they instituted that idiotic requirement, they refused to let you use a non-E-mail-address ID for iCloud.
Schools will now start discussing how to implement such measures; the rule starts being in force starting January 1st, 2024. Even then there will not be a law yet, though a law may come, depending on cooperation from schools and I guess political climate.
There is no mention of anything happening on October 1st. Now if NLTimes would have given us their sources, we might have known where they got that from.
[1]: https://nos.nl/artikel/2481424-kabinet-geeft-dringend-advies...
[2]: https://www.ad.nl/politiek/mobieltje-in-de-klas-in-de-ban-ou...
What changed that teachers started letting kids have phones in classrooms? It is utterly mind boggling to me that it was ever allowed in the first place.
Edit: To clarify, I'm in the US and phones in classrooms seem to be a common complaint among teachers. Something seems to have changed, just not sure what.
"Prevent"? Forbidding is easy. Actually preventing is another thing altogether.
> Due to persistent signals from teachers that they are unable to keep smartphones out of the classroom on their own, ...
So teachers already had the authority to forbid carrying of phones. Article offers no evidence that national authorities can do any better.
A useful life lesson in any case.
Let's try the same question, with another rule, to make the point;
"Imagine a teacher stops some kids from beating up another kid; if that happens how do you think they will feel about the teacher that did that? Do you think that kid will see eye to eye with the teacher after that?"
At some point there will be a need to set boundaries. That's the essence of socialization and necessarily a part of education. Teachers will have to set boundaries and enforce rules, that doesn't have anything to do with phones.
Few school rules come with the deprivation of your property though. Taking away a phone "for a week" as you suggested would be that. We had a kid who reported a computer crime to the police (a threat of violence). The police took his computer as evidence I believe. I don't think he's ever reporting something like that to the police again.
>"Imagine a teacher stops some kids from beating up another kid; if that happens how do you think they will feel about the teacher that did that? Do you think that kid will see eye to eye with the teacher after that?"
This point is ridiculous though. This rule protects other children, whereas the phone rule, especially the confiscation rule only affects the kid in question. Ie you're saying it's for their own good, but I bet that in 20 years the evidence will be a wash - that there really was no huge drop off in ability linked to phones in that generation.
>At some point there will be a need to set boundaries. That's the essence of socialization and necessarily a part of education. Teachers will have to set boundaries and enforce rules, that doesn't have anything to do with phones.
Sure, how about boundaries where the government doesn't make such insanely stupid laws? They're eventually going to use phones anyway in their daily life. It will be a constant thing next to them.
Ultimately you have to remember that the vast majority of students do NOT choose to be there. They're forced there by other laws. And while it is probably a good thing that they are there, it still feels akin to a prison for many of them. Pushing them down harder doesn't make them appreciate you more or necessarily improve the quality of their education.
You obviously never used a super soaker in class. There's plenty of stuff that will get confiscated if you use it in class. For good reason.
> there really was no huge drop off in ability linked to phones in that generation.
I dare to disagree. See linked research. Smartphones are dangerous.
> Sure, how about boundaries where the government doesn't make such insanely stupid laws?
I don't think that a law (or more likely; a regulation or advisement) to disallow mobile phones in the class room is a "insanely stupid" idea. "Insanely stupid" is - it seems - in the eye of the beholder.
> Ultimately you have to remember that the vast majority of students do NOT choose to be there
Kids are not adult. Kids don't want to eat greens, kids don't want to go to bed, kids don't want to brush teeth. Kids don't want to go to school.
> Pushing them down harder doesn't make them appreciate you more or necessarily improve the quality of their education.
No, but getting mobile phones out of the class room will. There's plenty of evidence that links "display time" with depression and suicide[0], attention and literacy deficits[1] and addiction[2].
I think that's worth it.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21677026177233...
- There's supposed to be a computer in front of every kid since grade one. Schools are instead banning the little computers kids smuggle in.
- Hypocrisy. Smartphone bans are pushed by people who use them all the time themselves.
- This is the same thing as with corporations locking down employees' computers. It's a policy designed for the worst behaving kids to the detriment of the best behaving ones. Poor use of time and poor self-control become expected and even the best kids will slide towards these low expectations.
- Totalitarian policies like this get passed only because teens and tweens are disenfranchised. Democratic government trying to enforce similar population-wide ban wouldn't last long.
- It's not about games or social media. Those are actually tolerated far better than apps like Socratic, which are treated like criminal level of cheating. This is technophobia all the way through.
I could go on and on about this. Contrary to people nitpicking details (health, parent contact, practicality of enforcement), I think this is fundamentally wrong.
- Hypocrisy. Smartphone bans are pushed by people who use them all the time themselves. [Because they are adults not kids]
- This is the same thing as with corporations locking down employees' computers. It's a policy designed for the worst behaving kids to the detriment of the best behaving ones. Poor use of time and poor self-control become expected and even the best kids will slide towards these low expectations. [employees are not kids, also employees are not in school they are in a job]
- Totalitarian policies like this get passed only because teens and tweens are disenfranchised. Democratic government trying to enforce similar population-wide ban wouldn't last long. [Totalitarian policies? This has to be a joke]
- It's not about games or social media. Those are actually tolerated far better than apps like Socratic, which are treated like criminal level of cheating. This is technophobia all the way through. [Of course. It's not about games and social media, it's a about kids not using a cell phone while in the classroom]
It is the same thing if the computers are uncensored as they should be. Kids are supposed to be taught responsibility since early age. If it can be done for computers, it can be surely done for smartphones.
> Because they are adults not kids
As someone else detailed in comments, this is aimed at secondary education and up, i.e. young adults (teens and tweens) rather than children.
> Totalitarian policies? This has to be a joke
Think again what would happen if your government tried to enforce this against adults. Wouldn't you call it totalitarian?
> it's a about kids not using a cell phone while in the classroom
It's about kids not using any computing device in the classroom. 19th century education. As I have said, this is technophobia all the way through.
I’m 37 and discovered around age 32 that I used my phone too much. It had crept into my waking life over around 8 years and became a real problem. Today I use a lot of strategies to prevent this, and it’s still challenging to ensure I don’t use it too much.
Kids are surrounded by adults like me or even worse than I am. They use their phones so much, rarely to any useful effect, and they train kids to do the same thing. Adults reject advice or instruction to use their phone less, always certain that they don’t do it for any bad reasons and that they’re in control.
Yet they aren’t. It’s a widespread, chronic, and tragically influential problem. Kids are using their phones way too much, but they’re only mimicking what so many adults around them are doing.
Phones also help fill agency gaps in their lives by allowing them to entertain themselves and socialize without relying on an adult to make things happen. Taking that away is hard and genuinely removes something positive from their lives — especially from their perspective.
I know some adults are not hypocrites. These days I’d like to think I’m not, but I certainly was. I think we need to have a handle on that problem before we can ban phones for kids without reasonable pushback from them.
Expecting kids to abstain from using them in an area should mean adults don’t use them either, though I can imagine cases where it is warranted and makes sense. But, here I think the adult should be expected to only use the phone when warranted.
Perhaps this isn’t typical, but the teachers in my kid’s schools use their phones way too much. It sets such a terrible example. I can try all I want to make screen time intentional in my home, but they go to school and see people (including adults they’re supposed to trust) using their phones without much restraint. I went on a field trip with my youngest and was blown away by how much the teachers were disappearing into screens on a regular basis.
To me, that’s a complete failure to model good behaviour. If kids are growing up with that, who are we to arbitrarily tell them they have to do better?
Do you feel the same way about cigarettes?
Edit: if people want to smoke privately or without sharing second hand smoke, I don’t think they should be stopped. I’m not trying to say it should be outlawed or something. I just don’t like being around it or having it normalized to kids (or even adults — we shouldn’t accept it as something people do so casually, especially in close proximity to non-smokers).
If you are thinking of children as prison inmates that deserve the totalitarian treatment, perhaps you are doing something wrong.
Policies apply to secondary education, i.e. high school. You are an adult in higher grades of high school.
PS: I did mention some reasons: computer for every pupil, Socratic app (and others), maintaining high expectations, resisting technological regress in schools that are already backwards. Not that this would be an exhaustive list.
No?
What exactly is so difficult to understand about a school being there for educational purposes, and the smartphone directly distracting from that?
> No?
Err, are you living in a (relatively) free society? My country has this principle written in the constitution: people can do anything the law does not prohibit whereas the government can only do what the law expressly permits it to do. I would think that's the standard in democracies.
No, you cannot do whatever the hell you want at school or at work.
Smartphone is a universal computer. You can use it for a variety of tasks, including education. Schools are supposed to teach that rather than throwing students back into the stone age.
Smartphones (and computers in general) aren't just any tool. If used properly, they are powerful cognitive multipliers. Removing them from schools is like giving every student a lobotomy, because they aren't using their brain the way they are supposed to.
To make no bones about it: I'm currently a student. I've so far never seen a need to use my smartphone for an educational reason. I've often seen people who have phones out when the teacher is talking. There should be no debate about smartphone usage in class generally being distracting, potentially to people other than the users. You may not agree with the proposed rules, but you're vastly overstating your case.
Computers as a tool for educational purposes is different than a TikTok stream.
Adults using smartphones is different than children using them during learning periods. And for what it's worth, adults should use them less during work hours. In any case, this bullet point is no justification for letting kids use social media in school.
Corporations locking down work terminals is legally permissible and morally correct. Unless you like the idea of a computer illiterate bank teller downloading zero days to the internal network because they have some fundamental freedom to browse the web on company resources.
It isn't totalitarian, I disagree completely with the use of that term and with the implication that teenagers should have franchise at any level above local. Yes, school for children has different expectations than adults in an open society.
It is about games and social media.
But nobody is banning TikTok. All schools that do anything about smartphones are always banning smartphones as such. Nobody is showing the kids how to use computers properly nor is anyone expecting them to use them for anything but games and social. Schools are just giving up on the subject and closing themselves in 19th century world. The same TikTok justification would be used against school computers until they are locked down so much they cannot be considered universal computers anymore.
> Corporations locking down work terminals is legally permissible and morally correct.
And a reliable way to get rid of the best employees by optimizing the whole organization for the worst ones. This is schools we are talking about. Pulling everyone down to the lowest standard of behavior is clearly against schools' mission. Schools should be instead optimized for the best students and push everyone to be their best selves.
> It isn't totalitarian, I disagree completely with the use of that term and with the implication that teenagers should have franchise at any level above local.
This is a bit OT, but aren't teenagers smarter that pensioners in every way you can measure except vocabulary? Aren't teenagers emotionally, cognitively, and physically clearly closer to 18+ adults than prepubescent children? If so, what makes you think they aren't effectively adults? Anyways, prepubescent children don't get to vote for practical reasons, specifically because they don't care and because they are under strong influence of their parents. Neither reason applies to teenagers.
Or, that we remove the problem by removing the tool entirely and without inspecting the devices contents?
You talk about using computers properly, which is a noble goal, but the banning of phones in classrooms has multiple reasons behind it. One of which is the belief that social media and smartphone games are addictive. Should we teach kids how to smoke cigarettes responsibly during their lunch break?
As for what I mean by technophobic propaganda, just listen to yourself: "the belief that social media and smartphone games are addictive". People aren't stupid. Psychological trickery can get games and media only so far. People crave a variety of experiences. It's not that hard to keep students' attention either by offering an interesting subject, by listening and being honest (for a change), or just by being there as a parent or teacher.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2019/08/30/the-mobil...
A notable omission from the article is how many schools already have this rule, because I can't imagine that any of them just lets the kids be on their phone during lessons. You're also not allowed to talk while the teacher is explaining something, or aren't allowed to work on homework for another subject or so. So even learning is prohibited if it's not for the right subject you're allocated right now: that's already in place, but banning phones is a problem? Curious
I speak as a father of teenagers.
Better they learn responsible use than have it imposed.
Good that schools do not have to learn responsible use, or unlearn irresponsible use, by just banning it whole sale.
You have the rest of their waking hours to do so (or not do so) as a parent.
So does life. I think we should lock the children in school from the beginning of the education period, without the access to the external, disctracting life. They can leave when they are 18.
I’m trying to understand how a child having a distracting and addicting smartphone is a good solution to the occasional misinformed teacher.
First, you will forget about all the bs they mentioned. Second, you can't confront the teacher over it or to ask them to clarify in a way that other kids will hear it too.
Still not a reason for a kid t have a smartphone in school.
> Fuck authoritarianism, especially when education is mandatory.
I don't exactly know what you consider "authoritarianism". But rules in schools by themselves certainly aren't an example of authoritarianism[1].
Re; "patriarchal propaganda"; seems like you yourself got quite the bit of anti-socialist propaganda.
Where else did inspiration for Pink Floyds The Wall come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall#Plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiest_Days_of_Our_Lives... ""The Happiest Days of Our Lives" concerns Pink's youth, attending a school run by strict and often violent teachers who treat the pupils with contempt."
You dont run an Empire by being nice!
To be clear, I am not saying kids SHOULD be on their phones in school or that no one has a bad relationship with their phone. Just that no one has actually bothered measuring this, they jumped straight to "it suits my prejudices so I believe it"...
Of course it may be more granular than the whole country, but schools organizing themselves as they see fit is an exception.
Parents seems to be extra in this statement. Decent parents can be evil and/or letting their kids too much, but a decent teacher can not.
The problem at the core is that education has ossified. A toxic combination of parents unable to accept that their children can have a better school experience than they had ("we had to hike two hours even during storms to go to school, stop complaining!!!"), privileged parents wanting to keep classist privileges for their children (this is a huge problem here in Germany where we separate between useless Hauptschule, just as useless Realschule and Gymnasium after 4th/6th year), politicians intimidated by the huge influence the well-networked classist parents have, underpaid staff and underfunded schools, burnt-out teachers who long since have given up on changing anything because of the lack of time, funds, respect for their work and backing by superiors...
30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck. Even worse as a lot of the stuff they learn is something they'll literally never even think about once in their life and they'll have to forget again after the test to make room for more useless crap. And every attempt to innovate gets shot down somewhere, so the teachers aren't really willing to adapt either - when I went to school a decade ago we had more than one teacher who used the same transparent sheets on an overhead projector that he made (and copied) decades ago, written on a typewriter.
Smaller class sizes, more teachers, interactive and engaging lessons... that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide and it actually works out even with conventional metrics, but these are expensive and have issues on their own (e.g. the tendency to attract pedos and weirdos, of which there have been a fair share of scandals).
Yes, I'm fed up with the sorry state of our education system.
Meanwhile, Asian countries continue to excel... but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of broken young souls, of families going into absurd debt, and of suicide.
At the same time, Western politicians rarely seem to listen to the scientists and instead prefer to do nothing at all - this is extremely dangerous for the future of our economies.
To me, the most important thing is to give schools and teachers the resources (staff, funding, proper and maintained buildings) they need to give every single child the best education they can without falling victim to the horrors of Asian education culture, because otherwise our economy is getting fucked.
Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.
> 30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck.
Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?
> that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide
Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.
Maybe it's time to put the world's best entertainment technologies to use for our educational systems instead of fucking Candy Crush.
> Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?
I did my Abitur in Bavaria, Germany in 2010. My 13 years of school life and ~60% of my 2-year stint in academia were precisely what I described, and the generation after me that profited from the infamous "G8" reforms for Bavarian Gymnasium schools reported just the same. New books, finally (one of mine still had the fucking Soviet Union...), but same old teaching methods. Something like smaller classes would have been impossible due to a lack of teachers.
> Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.
Kids shouldn't have to hope their parents know that this is an option or have the money for that to receive good education. Education is a human right and the only chance societies have for a survivable future.
People aren't idiots. Kids aren't idiots either. They want more than mindless entertainment. A school computer with Scratch can easily compete with a platformer on the phone. School in general is in a good position to be empowering, but the system prefers to be oppressive instead.
He deleted Socratic app soon after I have shown it to him though, but not because he needed space for games, but rather because "the teacher must not see this". You should have seen the panic in his eyes.
Also, the only social media he is using is classroom Whatsapp, which is effectively required by the school, because there is no other reliable source of information about missed classes and other school matters.
All those kids playing games and scrolling through social media might be just fulfilling teachers' expectations after all.
Yes, emergencies happened before cell phones. People died of them more often back then.
Specifically those outside of the US, we know that is an outlier.
The United States of America isn't the main character of history.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-fixes-nightma...
If not, all the adjacent classrooms almost certainly have a teacher present, who will also be trained in first aid.
Large number of students in Nederlands do not speak local language. Smartphone is essential for translation and communication with them. It also allows calling 911, and video/audio recording evidence, if there are any misunderstandings.
This rule feels like teachers are solving their problems at expense of students!
And I’m not sure that calling 911 would help them, in the Netherlands.
NOT having to own an abusive manipulation tool should be a basic human right.
And let's be very clear about this: almost all apps are intentionally designed to be manipulative. Try disabling notifications for example, and most apps will whine and whinge and bully you until you enable it. The design of these things is thoroughly and profoundly abusive.
Never mind of course that "smartphone" in practicality means "Android and iOS", and "must give monies to this huge duopoly" is something I have a bone or two to pick with as well.
> Large number of students in Nederlands do not speak local language
This problem can be solved by learning Dutch.
Children are not allowed to ride the bus inside the classroom either. So I guess we're okay.
> Large number of students in Nederlands do not speak local language. Smartphone is essential for translation and communication with them.
Nobody is doing this on a regular basis, except maybe during an intake session. If something exceptional comes up then the teacher can use their phone to translate.
> It also allows calling 911
Not going to try, but I'm not sure 911 works here. 112 is the emergency number (and that's an actual worldwide standard, works in the USA as well).
According to Wikipedia it redirects to 112, just as I expected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...